Byung Chul Han: God is not death | Babelia – kudupinter World News Network

In a letter addressed to the Dominican priest Joseph Perrin, the French philosopher Simone Weil expressed how painful it was to imagine “that the thoughts which descended upon me were condemned to death by the contagion of my insufficiency and my misery”. The gradual recognition of his work and the impact he had on the intellectual world after his death 34 years ago quickly dissipated his fears. Albert Camus defined him as “the unique free spirit of our time”, a person endowed with a great sense of truth accompanied by great intelligence and great honesty.

The South Korean philosopher and theologian Byung Chul Han, Princess of Asturias Prize 2025 for communication and human sciences, considers Weil “the most brilliant intellectual figure of the 20th century”, and in this book he establishes with her and with her work an in-depth and enlightening dialogue on the darkness of the present from a creative hermeneutics. It is not a timeless and aseptic dialogue, a bell that challenges today’s society characterized, according to Chul Han, by a neoliberal dictatorial regime that exploits our freedom and in which human beings have become slaves of their own creation, by a world that has become a “noisy market”, by social networks that spread aggression and hatred towards a democracy that, without ethics, grows in content and because the gap is widening more and more between rich and poor.

The philosopher of Korean origin acknowledges feeling a “deep friendship of the soul” with Simone Weil, a philosopher, mystic and intellectual who is compassionate towards the most vulnerable people and collectives, and navigates his thinking to show that, more than ever, the inmanence of production, consumption, big data and the insatiable need for information, there is a transcendence capable of offering us the fullness of being and freeing us from a life of simple survival and devoid of meaning.

The dialogue with Weil revolves around a series of fundamental words drawn from the French philosopher’s experiences and thoughts: attention, despair, emptiness, beauty, pain, silence and inactivity.

The dialogue revolves around a series of fundamental words taken from the experiences and thoughts of the French philosopher: attention, despair, emptiness, beauty, pain, silence and inactivity. Qualified interlocutors from today and today also participate: from Socrates, Plato and Kant to Agamben, Foucault and Steiner, including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kafka, Levinas, Adorno and Benjamin, who open new horizons for the thoughts and feelings of Chul Han and Weil.

The first thing to note is the crisis of religion and the spirit due to structural and not purely regional causes, among which we cite the loss of silence, the decline of attention and the great noise of communication. But despite the crisis, “It is not God who died, but the human being where God revealed himself“. Where is God rebelling now? In the answer to this question, the originality of the philosophy of Weil and Chul Han is manifested.

God does not reveal himself through the attributes of the ancient theodicy: omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, providence and even violence. Where then? Into the void and nudity, following the mystics, notably Master Eckhart and San Juan de la Cruz; in the silence of God, which is more powerful than any word: in deep attention, which Simone Weil calls “the palanca of the soul”, in which all the creative capacity of the human being takes its origin; in beauty which, quoting Plato, the philosopher considers to be an experience of God; in the aesthetic contemplation of both nature and a Greek statue, which “constitutes in itself a test of God”; in pain, who is the new matron; in negativity as a path of ascension towards God; in attention without distraction.

An apology book? No. An excellent lecture on the philosophy of religion from the most creative and influential thinkers of our time.

I believe that Simone Weil and Byung Chul Han gave a good definition of God by José Saramago: “God is the great silence of the universe and the human being is the cry that gives meaning to this silence”.